The Worst 'Great Gatsby' Review Lines You Won't Be Seeing on Ads This Week

The first round of movie reviews have arrived for Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby — and they are decidedly mediocre. Everyone kind of saw this coming; this was Gatsby all gussied up with lavish designer costumes, 3D, and Jay-Z, after all. We now know that Luhrmann has added the framing device of Nick Carraway telling the story as an alcoholic from a sanitarium, but much of the initial shrugging remains. The consensus seems to be that translating Carraway's first-person narration is a tricky task at which Luhrmann doesn't really succeed, and that Aussie newcomer Elizabeth Debicki deserves praise as Jordan Baker. As for the rest of it, well, let's just say these one-liners won't exactly get blurbed on posters, trailers, or any marketing material whatsoever ahead of Friday's release:

"Periodically, as if by accident, something like real emotion pokes up through the film’s well-manicured surface..." — Scott Foundas of Variety.

"The picture is filled with an indiscriminate swirling motion, a thrashing impress of 'style' (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), thrown at us with whooshing camera sweeps and surges with rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D." — David Denby of The New Yorker

"Finally this overproduced slimmest of narratives becomes repetitive, at two hours and 23 minutes, as we revisit the sumptuous set pieces, Gatsby looking longingly across the water toward Daisy's glowing green dock, and hear yet another iteration of the morphing Gatsby backstory until we finally reach Carraway's last words..." — Anne Thompson of Indiewire.

News reports are focusing on the Germanwings pilot's possible depression, following a familiar script in the wake of mass killings. But the evidence shows violence is extremely rare among the mentally ill.